Tatyana Tolstaya

 I found Tatyana Tolstaya in prison thanks to the interlibrary loan program and having seen her mentioned in regards to Russian fantasy. The Russians do not have orcs in their fantasy fiction. I read her novel The Slynx wherein a post-apocalyptic Russia subsists on mice. 

Joy Williams reviewed Tolstaya's AETHERIAL WORLDS: STORIES for Book Forum. About the writer, Williams wrote:

Russians, she maintains, want grace, even when they don’t deserve it. Particularly when they don’t deserve it. They expect grace because they know God enjoys bestowing it. God says: “You, human, are a foul and drunken swine; I, in My inexpressible mercy, will shower you with the earthly comforts you desire—forget-me-nots, loose women, dough, booze, and chicken pot pie—all out of turn. For that is My whim.”

I would say this idea of God happily enjoying the bestowing of grace is that of Orthodox Christianity.  She continues with more particularity:

 Tolstaya is divinely quotable—slangy, indignant, lyrical, crude. She picks you up—you’re light as a feather—and carries you along. You’re blown this way and that, cuddled and cast down, mocked and treasured. You don’t know where you’re going. None of it makes a lick of sense. It’s all detritus. It’s all sublime. The important becomes unimportant. The unimportant becomes . . . something else. Aunty Lola’s “personal cup—the one she drank her tea from and forbade us to touch—now idled in the sideboard; now you could just take it, but no one wanted to anymore.

***

She has been compared to Chekhov. Absurd: Chekhov, that sorrowful physician, that delicate ironist. Tolstaya barrels by him and knocks him in the ditch. Could Chekhov have written The Slynx, her novel about a post-nuclear-blast Russia where people eat mice and use them as currency, fear books (though treasure the sayings of Pushkin: “Life, you’re but a mouse’s scurry, why do you trouble me?”), won’t touch honey because it’s bee shit, are startled by chicken eggs (“Lord save us!—there was a yellow ball that looked like it was floating in thick water”), and blame their lack of reasoning skills on the Slynx, a howling, snappish creature that lives in the forest?

***

...But the collection ends with the story “See the Reverse,” in which a blind man outside a chapel messily consumes a piece of pizza—“fumbling in the dark for that invisible and magnificent sustenance.” Which seems a perfect metaphor for what we crave from a story, and what we receive from this irrepressible, uncorrallable writer.

Yeah, I recall all that from my reading of The Slynx. I will post my notes on that novel when I find them. Meanwhile, you can read two of her short stories here and here.

I will be tracking down more by and about Tolstaya at Ball State's Bracken Library. This access to more works about and by a writer marks real change from prison life. 

Do track down The Slynx. Or keep an eye open for any of her other books. It will payoff for you.

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12/10/21